Yes, it is true that a site that does not perform well on Google may have great placement on Bing.
So what are the tips to try to get better placement on Bing?
1. Make sure that you have created a Bing Webmaster Account and use this account to upload your sitemap.xml file.
2. Others have stated that to have a highly accurate sitemap that does not contain any pages with a 404 (page not found) error is key for placement on Bing. I have not necessarily found this to be a huge factor, but it is a good practice to regularly re-spider your site and create a fresh site map and to evaluate errors in the site map.
3. Get social, especially on Facebook. I do agree with this approach, especially when you review the tight integration that Facebook and Bing have created. Facebook activity (meaning interaction and follower growth not just updates) may play a very important part in organic placement on Bing. One need go no further to understand this integration than to review Bing’s properties (Skype and Sky Drive) to see the tight connection that Bing is pushing with Facebook inside these applications. The key is that if you want placement on a search engine, you pay attention to what they consider important and play the game their way. Google considers Google+ key and Bing considers Facebook key.
4. Make sure you have a robots.txt file. Now others have stated that they feel this is key to good placement on Bing. I personally have not see sites without one take a dive in organic results, but it is a best practice to include one for all sites and for all search engines.
5. Strive to have a low page/site bounce rate. Some have said that this is key to good placement on Bing. It makes sense that Google and Bing consider the bounce rate important in their algorithm for placement with today’s focus on user relevancy. I don’t consider this however a Bing only placement item.
6. Make sure you have unique content. This one is a no-brainer really. In today’s new world of search if you are not providing unique content that has real and perceived value for readers your site will drop in organic placement over time. Content needs to be updated on a regular basis and created with your unique audience in mind. Content for the sake of content is not an approach I would recommend. If this means you need to do one blog post a week that is well-written and shareable instead of three days a week of thin or scraped content, go with the lower frequency but higher value approach.
7. It used to be that Bing liked bolded text specifically top keywords in your content and preferentially showed sites that embraced this approach. I do not however encourage use of this tactic. Many of the things SEO’s have done in the past for both Google and Bing have been devalued as of late.
Many of the things you would do for placement on Google are important to get placement on Bing as well. The gap of how to place on Bing versus Google is getting narrower and narrower. So I would take the approach of making my website the most interesting for my audience and share and interact preferentially on Facebook for placement on Bing specifically.
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